Apparently I must look like death warmed over. I've had three different people in three completely different situations tell me that I should see a doctor in just the past week alone. Of course it doesn't help that I can't remember the last time I actually saw my doctor. Maybe I should schedule a physical. Maybe they'll tell me that I have some weird disabling disease that will put me on workmen's comp for the rest of my life. I don't know if I'm coping better or worse than some of my coworkers. I took a couple of boxes of work home over the weekend and as I was leaving one of my coworkers saw me. He freaked out and thought I was quitting. I guess it's nice to be wanted. In a conversation with one of the newer people, it was mentioned that August was typically a slow month. I agreed and said that was why I was trying to get a jump on my work by taking it home. It was asked what was going to happen when it really started to get busy. I said that those who were aware were already preparing and those that weren't were standing on the train tracks going, "What's that noise?"

So Barry Manilow, hot off his Emmy win last night went in for double hip surgery today. Hopefully all went well. I wonder if he actually took his Emmy to the hospital for good luck? I watched the Emmy telecast. I didn't think it was too bad. I'm very disappointed that Julia Louis-Dreyfus won. Granted the category was a little weak...um, Lisa Kudrow? At the very least it should have gone to Debra Messing as a parting gift. I didn't have any strong pull toward any one win or loss I guess. That's what happens when you don't have time to watch network television much anymore. I realized that I only followed one series in real time through it's season and that was Entourage. Everything else I either caught up on through DVD's or caught sporadic episodes here and there. Speaking of random episodes, Psych is a good show in case I haven't mentioned it before.

Every once in a while something will slip past the big picture recognition and I'll end up looking it up and having that ah ha moment when it all clicks into place. When I saw the musical production of Jonathan Larson's Rent, it was in Pittsburgh so needless to say I didn't see the original cast. But, I was so taken by the orchestration and the music that I decided to buy the CD. Trust me, it was a rough decision. I don't buy many CDs. Anyway, the CD did have the original cast. Idina Menzel, who coincendentally is also on the Wicked cast CD that I bought after seeing the Pittsburgh production. I'd love to switch out Kendra Kessebaum with Kristen Chenoweth on the CD, but that's another story. Anyway, after listening to Anthony Rapp, who plays Mark on both the CD and in the movie version of Rent, I thought that he sounded familiar. And, when I saw the movie version, I thought he looked familiar, but I didn't think much of it since the name didn't really ring a bell. Then after seeing the movie again last night and finding it on again today (gotta love the satellite) I decided to see where I knew him from. Turns out he was the loud-mouthed friend from Adventures In Babysitting. Bizarre.
Why is doing what you love to do and getting paid big money for it selling out to a certain sect of artists?

Head over to The Mutchler's blog to see some pictures of new baby Nicholas. And Matt, 3 is not plenty.
For the first time since 2002, I'm sitting in Pennsylvania on the last weekend in August. No one that I know that normally attends the Nascar race in Bristol is actually attending this year. Trust me, I like watching the race on television, but Bristol is so much better live. Hopefully all my drivers will perform well and win me some cash since I didn't make it down this year. One of the things that I really miss is flipping back and forth on the scanner and listening to the drivers. Bristol is a half-mile track with 165,000 people packed around it. There are 43 cars that when running nose to tail take up most of the track so when you get bumped for position you lose a lot of space. I would have loved to be listening to Tony Stewart's scanner when he got bumped and lost 11 spots because there was no opening in line.

Well I didn't manage to get all the BMG stuff done last night, it was crazy! It's like being told you can only have one piece of candy shopping in the Sweets From Heaven at the local mall, not one kind of candy but one piece! I mean one piece! One total piece! With myriad decisions to make, just one piece! Craziness!!!!
Disclaimer: The post above was brought about due to the fact that I can...ha! ha!

Short post tonight. I have much research to do. BMG is running their buy 1 get 3 free special. That's the only one I take advantage of because it's the only one that breaks down to be worth it.

Since I feel bad that my rant probably overshadowed the announcement of Matt and Alison's new baby Nicholas, hopefully this will make up for it.

A Mother and Father's Prayer

I know you’re listening as I lay me down to sleep
It’s not for me I ask, but my children’s souls to keep
It seems the world is going crazy
And though I need to do my share
Could you please take them under wing
Watch over them especially
Keeping them safe from everything
This is a mother’s prayer
I know you’re listening in the silence of the night
The news is blistering but I hold on to your light
And though there’s darkness all around us
By my faith I know you’re there
Give me the strength to lead the way
Send me the words I need to say
Use me to guide them day to day
This is a mother’s prayer
This is a father’s prayer
I know I can’t do this by my self
I thank you for your help
I know you’re listening so I know I’m not alone
I feel you here with me as we all face down the unknown
Could you return us to your garden
Where no one’s hurt and no one’s scared
Free us from pride and bitterness
Keep us so close we won’t forget
Teach us to love as you love
This is a mother’s prayer
This is a father’s prayer
Teach us to love as you love
This is a mother’s, a father’s prayer

Congratulations to Matt, Alison, and Nathan welcoming Nicholas Ian into the world today! Our circle of friends is ever widening.
Based on the wonderful news we headed out to do some DVD shopping, more about that later. I want to talk about the in-between DVD stop because it set me up for a great let down based on the rest of the evening. Anyone who knows me knows about my media lists. I have lists for books, cds, dvds, etc. Well my book list goes with me anytime I'm headed within a 1/2 mile of a used bookstore. It has things I'm looking for, collections to fill out, missing books from favorite authors, recommendations and just things in general that I wouldn't pay full price for. Two collections that I've been working on for quite a while have been the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books. There are several incarnations of each, but the original series have gone through a dozen or more printings. I wanted the hardback versions that I read as a child. At Half-Price Books, these are classified as Vintage and Classic books and typically cost a little more, but it's usually worth it. So, over the course of many many trips, I've picked up all the original Hardy Boys (total of 58) and I had picked up 55 of the 56 Nancy Drew originals. I've been looking for #56 for a long long time. Tonight, shining with it's own little light on the Vintage shelf was #56. It was great. Then I was skimming the Stephen King section and there was "The Road to the Dark Tower." I had previously bought two copies of this book. One for Tom and one for Matt. When I went to get my own copy, I couldn't locate it readily so I figured I'd just wait for it to reappear. It took til now. Both of these finds made me think I was going to pick up my sought after DVD and be on my way in time to watch an episode or two.
I swear the DVD people are out to screw me over any way they possibly can. When a new set of DVDs comes out, the first place I check is Costco. They typically have the cheapest prices. Then it's a toss-up between Best Buy and Target. So, typically if I'm out DVD hunting these are my three stops at Robinson. Well, I headed to Costco for the second season of Veronica Mars which came out today. I want to make sure that we're caught up before the third season starts so we can actually watch a show in real time. So I cruise through all the DVDs at Costco. No Veronica Mars. Not a huge deal, they don't always get anything in. But they do have all 3 seasons of the original Star Trek series for $45 apiece. That's the cheapest I've seen them by far. And they have the first six seasons of the Simpsons for $15 apiece. So I had to exercise my willpower and just walk away.
So, I head over to Best Buy. I look in the New Releases, but there's a big gaping hole where Veronica Mars is supposed to be. No biggie, they usually file them in two or three places. I go to the regular shelves. Three copies of the first season, no second season. And they are nowhere to be found in the rest of the store. But of course, season 4 of 24 is on sale. Now I'm a bit peeved. So we head over to Target. Two places with signs advertising the second season arriving today...two holes right above the signs. Again no copies to be found, but Arrested Development is on sale. So now I've been to three places and seen sales at all three that on any normal day would already be sitting on my shelf, but still not the purchase I wanted. So, I had to break down and go to the ghetto Wal-Mart. They had it filed in two places one was empty. The second had two copies left. Boy are they lucky.

So I had Batman Begins on in the background while I was working on the computer tonight. During a couple of exchanges this quote gets thrown around, "It's not who you are on the inside, but what you do that defines you." Seems harmless enough on the surface, but does that mean that you can do charitable works, give of your time and energy and be a demented psychopathic serial killer on the inside? Somehow that seems to undermine the implication behind the statement. Of course on the other hand that could mean that Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are actually Nobel Prize winners on the inside, but they are defined by their actions so we see them as vapid morons. I'm pretty sure that it's the inside persona that manifests itself on the outside in some magnitude or other. For example, you could be an incredibly honest and caring person on the inside, but be relatively shy so it's manifested in small gestures like holding the door for the person behind you or giving blood. Small things that, on the whole, go unnoticed by the public at large. I think that in order to do good you have to have some measure of good within you to begin with. Maybe I've just been awake a little too long.

Well, I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. For about 10 hours today, I've been working on listing and integrating the books that I've acquired recently. And, I've run out of room on the shelves I have. It looks as though I need to start looking into a 10th set of bookshelves. I don't know if the space actually exists in the library though. It's going to take some careful measuring. And, until I figure out how to fit one in here and actually purchase and assemble it, I still have the problem of having about 50 just sitting on the floor. So much for finishing that task today.

Well it's almost Friday. Then hopefully we'll get somewhere in the vicinity of a half-day or so to work around the house. Saturday we're supposed to head to my parent's for a barbecue so that will pretty much kill the entire day. By the time we get home from church and get Gage down for a nap, 1/2 of Sunday is gone so I'm right back into the week. It almost makes me want to just work straight through. My goals this weekend...Straighten up the library and integrate and list the stacks of new books laying around, hopefully mow the lawn and get a little weed whacking down and hopefully get some of the financing down to push us toward larger goals. Oh and then there's that whole exercise thing, relaxing, the stack of DVD's that grow bigger, the race and so on and so on.

So years ago I worked for a small start-up firm that dealt mostly with affiliate marketing (read borderline scams). The company could have been something really good, but it was being held back by one significant force...the President and CEO. That is a whole different story. This story deals with the fact that with the user testing and product searches that I did back then. This was before spam and junk mail really blew up into a cottage industry. So, for a month or two on the job, I was actually filling out all of the testing materials as a user. As such, attached to my personal email account I had profiles at dating sites, Netflix, enewsletters, and various other crap. As soon as my personal email started stacking up, I quickly set up a trail of dummy accounts. Now, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 years or so I still see remnants of that job. I'll get emails and snail mail mailings from Netflix asking me to reopen my membership (which, as a test, was cancelled less than 1 hour after completion...that should tell you how long data mining and user profiling sticks around on their end) and at this point since my isp switched mailing domains, I'll get mail from the old domain, but certain sites...two in particular don't recognize the forwarding while attempting to cancel the membership profile to get the hell off the list. After multiple attempts to cancel profiles on two dating sites, I finally gave up. Typically it's a once a week email to show me my new "matches" so I figured I could live with hitting the delete button twice as opposed to the half-hour I lost on hold to one of them.
Now, either one of the sites is truly attempting to get me back or someone thought an inactive, incomplete, and pictureless profile compiled in less than 5 minutes was interesting. I got an email stating I had a personal message and should log right in and check it out.
Normally I think...plot to reacquire my membership...and delete. This email, however, had a picture, username, description, and the message. So, I'm uncertain. The message is just vague enough, but they spelled the word "profile" wrong in the first sentence. So, I feel like it's not an auto send from a database, but really...would they go to lengths that great to get me to log in to the site? The other choice also not that appealing. There really is a 36 year old woman in western PA that thinks I'm "very smart and attractive" based on crap I made up to blow off stuff at work.

So we've been having a discussion (actually, can you call it a discussion if it takes place in the midst of typing emails, answering client calls and interacting with other employees?) about the beaches of Hawaii. My partner just returned and was discussing the white sand beaches to which another pod-mate replied that all of that was brought in from somewhere else. So a google and wikipedia tour later, nothing is overly solved. Then we were into what comprised a white sand beach. Was it calcium and carbonate or decomposed sea-life and shells or limestone or quartz or something else altogether. And now that I think about it, is it really a discussion if it has no point?
We actually have feeler emails out to the department of land and natural resources in Hawaii and the travel bureau. AAA was no help and calling the info desk at Pitt just met with laughter.
Any first hand knowledge out there?

When work intrudes at home and home completes the circle by intruding at work and everything is a screaming level 5 priority with all the red exclamation points beside it, where do you begin? Well, you do like I did on Saturday and you just shut down. I did not accomplish one meaningful thing on Saturday. Which would have been great if I could have just picked up Sunday and not thought about it, but of course there was guilt about blowing stuff off and all the time that I could have been doing something else. If time stood still starting right now...I'd catch up somewhere around 2010 with everything.

Ah, I guess it is August. Which means that the parents of the world have already seen the arrival of fall oriented things in the store and began to give thought to the Halloween costume choices available this year. The Folks over at De Stijl have a little girl who is slightly younger than Gage. They have a little costume pool going on over there. Terri and I haven't discussed it much yet this year. Last year's Yoda went over really well so we're going to have to see about following it up.

Day 4 Post-Performance After the reading, we headed out into the cool humid as hell night air. We managed to get in touch with Adam and his friend and we met them down near the Port Authority. Adam's friend is incredibly nice, intelligent, and it was great to finally meet her. We decided on the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, although if we had known about the faulty air-conditioning we'd have nixed it in a heart beat. Again, severe heat diminishes appetite. After dinner and conversation we decided to part ways. Times Square has more people milling about at 1 in the morning than Pittsburgh does at 1 in the afternoon. I'm not overly surprised by that, but it's just interesting to see in person.
Day 5 The long way home Once we got up, we made a quick plan of action. Down 10 blocks to the Toys R Us to pick up the exclusive collector's tin of the Star Wars Trivial Pursuit DVD game. Then back to the hotel to cram everything into what little luggage we brought, cab to Penn Station (best $7.00 we spent all trip), and train back to Trenton, light rail back to Camden, walk to the car, pack everything else up and head home. My parents had already left with Gage so we had a clear shot the 300 or so miles back across the state to their house. We left New York somewhere between 10 and 11, by 10 that night we were back in good old Pittsburgh. Of course, that meant that the next morning I had to get back up and go to work.

Day 4 Performance For those of you that don't know, this trip was built around the fact that Terri, Tom and I had tickets to a benefit reading (The Haven Foundation and Doctors Without Borders) given by Stephen King, John Irving, and JK Rowling. So we make it to Radio City and deal with the morons handing out flyers for a Harry Potter conference. I'm not even going to justify it with an explanation. We get inside, find out seats, which aren't bad considering I had never been there and picked off the net. Tom and I spent the time leading up to the performance discussing the three authors. He's not enthralled with Rowling in the least, he's not read any of the books and doesn't take kindly to her being compared to King and Irving as one of the greatest authors. The program lists them as three superstar authors. King has written somewhere in the vicinity of 50 novels. Not that I'm arguing proficiency makes you great (think Harper Lee), but it don't hurt. His views on everyday life and his unique twist in taking the mundane to the macabre and back again have earned him legions of "faithful readers." Irving, not quite as prolific, he's closing in on a dozen novels. However, his reach is far and wide due to several widely successful film adaptations to introduce readers to his books and vice-versa. Rowling has completed 6. According to rumors and straight from the author's mouth she's "well into the 7th novel." Again, I'm not saying that volume = anything, but her 6 books, though massive bestsellers, are all about the same subject in the same world. No stretch of the imagination, if you'll pardon the pun. So to put her in the same league just kind of set both of us on edge. The woman in the front of us was kind of leaning back looking for some way to interject on the subject of Rowling's only redeeming feature being the alleged fact that a new generation will discover other authors through her books, but when the topic shifted back to our start on King, I did some quick math and realized that I was 8 or 9 when I read my first King novel (Pet Sematary). This widened the woman's eyes and completely took the wind out of whatever argument she was gearing up for. Which, was good considering the house lights began to dim and special guest Whoopi Goldberg was announced. She did several minutes praising everyone involved and making the audience laughed. Then she introduced Kathy Bates. Also well received, Kathy did her piece on Stephen King. At the end, they cut to a video montage of interviews, movie clips, and peer observations on King. While they were showing the video, stage hands quickly moved out a platform containing a rural setting onto stage right. King came out and read the pie-eating contest section from the novella that became Stand By Me. Then the house voice introduced Andre Baugher who, in turn, introduced John Irving. Another video and stage left was occupied with a platform resembling a den complete with fireplace. Irving read the selection of roles for the Christmas pageant from "A Prayer for Owen Meaney." The house voice then introduced Jon Stewart who, in turn, introduced JK Rowling. The video segment went by and center stage was replaced with a platform resembling a castle like setting. Rowling read from book 6. Immediately after her segment, Rowling began to take a few pre-selected questions. It was then that I began to realize that the reality of my worst nightmare was unfolding before my eyes.
JK Rowling is a media whore. She enjoyed lording her vague answers over the audience. She's not going to be able to give that up with one more novel and three movie adaptations. My initial thought is that she's going to attempt a book far from Potter and his world, it will initially be received tepidly and then fall flat because her fan base won't understand how to adapt. A slew of bad reviews, more bad press when the paperback hits, comparisons abound and two or three years later and we'll be back in Potter's world. It won't necessarily have him as the focus (though it didn't look as though she'd be able to give that up either) and whatever credibility she would have had will disappear faster than (God help me) Harry wrapping his invisibility cloak around himself.
Thankfully after a couple questions they brought King and Irving back for a few questions posed to them.
Post performance and trip wrap-up tomorrow hopefully.

Okay, Day 1 was a lot of travel. We went from Pittsburgh to Williamsport and visited with Brian and Brian. A helpful hint, if you don't really enjoy being jumped on and licked by a wild puppy, playing kitten isn't the optimal idea.
Day 2 We woke up at my uncle and aunt's and headed out to do a little shopping. Gage actually rode around in his stroller and then proceeded to fall asleep in his stroller. When we got back to the house, we packed up again and headed to a picnic given by my aunt's nephew, at least I think that's who it was. That's where we discovered Gage liked playing fetch. Also, we met a throwback from the 80's, right down to the orange hair bow. Hopefully I'll find some time in the near future to get the pictures up here.
Day 3 We headed out to Camden, met Tom for lunch, relaxed at his place til he was done with work and then headed out with him and Adam and saw Clerks II. Then we headed to the new Cheesecake Factory that just opened up and had a pretty good meal.
Day 4 We got up, headed to the "light rail" and rode from Camden to Trenton. Then we hopped on a train and headed into New York City. We got off at Penn Station and walked 17 blocks (on what we later found out was the hottest day of the millennium in Manhattan) to the hotel. The hotel, which left a lot to be desired, did have one thing going for it. When we walked out of the front door of the hotel, we could look down a block and a half and see Radio City Music Hall, which was the ultimate destination that evening. We found out that the heat kills your appetite. Which wasn't totally bad after we saw the prices for food in Manhattan. We had lunch at ESPNZone. Then we did some shopping since the stores were air-conditioned. We hit Toys R Us, which had several life-size Lego statues. Then we hit the Virgin Records Mega-Store. Needless to say, I could have spent the rest of the day (and the rest of my salary) in that store. In reality, I left the store having purchased...not one thing. For those of you that have trouble believing that, I have Tom and Terri as witnesses. We hit lots of souvenir type shops and I almost forgot FAO Schwartz. Then we headed back to the hotel, which left a lot to be desired, and showered off some of the grime that we had accumulated during the day. Then we headed to the performance. More to follow tomorrow. Time to hit the bike. I'm not giving up $100 without a fight.

Ok, no vacation recap just yet. I need to have a little more time to get everything sorted out. I did want to show you guys this. Tom sent me this article. Now, there are several things mentioned in here that were of interest. One, his shows will be scheduled well into 2007, which bodes well for a potential trip. Second, he'll have a new album coming out around my birthday. Also, I started looking at the picture accompanying the article and damned if it didn't spark something of a childhood memory. I must say that time has not been kind to either of them.

We're back and eventually I'll get the trip recap posted here.